ABSTRACT
Most people believe that targeted interventions are good and nontargeted interventions are bad. Targeted interventions are approaches that attempt to directly help the poor improve their economic, physical, or social conditions. Nontargeted interventions are universal provisioning approaches and are costly: everyone gets something. Not all well-targeted interventions produced positive effects on poverty reduction. Verifying the targeting criteria for each prospective applicant to a program can be costly and is often difficult to determine accurately because of cost content and interpretation issues. Joachim von Braun made an important observation when he noted the lack of sufficient evaluative evidence for whether targeted interventions perform better than nontargeted ones for poverty reduction. Targeted interventions require broad-based approaches first to reach out efficiently to the poorest. The evaluation findings in general indicate that success in making a difference in the life of the poor, particularly in low-potential areas, depends also on how donors' interventions are coordinated.
